As inexperiencied teachers you might have a narrow peception about evaluation really means and involves. In contrast, there are several and different aspects and issues concerned to evaluation that a teacher must bear in mine if it is required to have a better teaching performance and more effective learning programs.
This book analyzes the different contexts where evaluation takes place and several methods intended to help teachers make effective decitions in their classrooms. In a teaching context some different scenarios can emerge where the teacher would have to make sound decisions in order to aplly solutions and in the same way make changes that directly will affect the current program. As in this book is stated, evaluation involves gathering information to make decisions, due to this, the teacher should follow some methods and take into account important aspects and recognize several evaluation contents and concepts.
In the evaluation process exists three kinds of participants: parents, teachers and students, but the proffesional criterion and physical resources must be taken into account. Some evaluation steps are recognized in this book in order to develop a evaluation method.
Evaluation steps
In general, evaluation follows threee basic steps:
-To gather information.(there are various ways)
-To interpret the information( there are varios kinds of interpretation)
-To make decitions based on the information gathered.
Furthermore, I would like to add that a fourth step could be added as to find better ways to implement the decsions bearing in mind in which way that decisions will affect our program and students performance.
Collecting information
It is quite important to bear in mind the importace of gather information beyond students scores (numbers) there is a lot of ways information can be collected and various kinds, as for example: Observation of students behaviour, students comments, students journas, tests etc.
If the teacher requires to know more about a student performance in a test, he must do a deeper analysis of the student score taking into account some external aspects as: The maximum score, the text content, language objectives, other student performance, students presence in the class, time dedicated to study etc, among other facts. Other sound questions must be analyzed too as for example: Is the test representative of that has been taught?
Purpose
One of the most important aspect is to identify the purpose, the nature of the purpose determines the type of information needed and the method of collecting that information.The teacher undertakes evaluation in order to:
-Make decisions about follow-up instruction.
-Ascertain the effectiveness of instruction units in order to improve or maybe change them.
-Foster students in formulating personal learning objectives.
-Analyze students reactions to some instruction units(checklist)
It is quite interesting to discover the wide scope of evaluation and the huge amount of aspects, effects, reactions and fields it involves, in the same way it called my attention the great way in which this subject will affect our teaching and our students performance.
